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Sun-Times Hires Sr. Ryan Chiu for Summer as Director of Mobile App Development

Ryan Chiu, a graduating senior from Grayslake, landed an impressive job for a recent high school graduate, to say the least; this summer, Ryan will be the Director of Mobile Application Development for the Chicago Sun-Times. Ryan will focus on developing a new independent news application for the Sun-Times, a project that he has been working on throughout this past year as an intern.

This opportunity came when Josh Metnick, the Chief Technology Officer at Sun-Times publisher Wrapports, LLC, and Ryan’s mentor, was given clearance to hire a full-time employee to work on the Sun-Times mobile application. Ryan has been working for Metnick since starting an internship with him through IMSA’s TALENT office. “I knew at the time that I definitely enjoyed programming, but I had since then only coded for fun,” said Ryan about his intern experience. He started working for several coding projects for Metnick’s company, including the Chicago.com project.

By the end of Ryan’s junior year, Chicago.com was bought by the Chicago Sun-Times, and Josh Metnick was appointed as the Chief Technology Officer for Wrapports, LLC, the company that owns the Sun-Times and several other online newspapers around the nation. The summer before his senior year, Ryan was offered a paid position as a Software Engineer at the Sun-Times.

True to IMSA’s ideals, Ryan is eager to make tangible, positive change for his new employer. “I am most excited about the ability to collaborate with other software engineers to tackle a real-world issue,” Ryan said. “There's only a certain amount of material that you can learn in a classroom setting, but getting to apply the knowledge that I learned in computer science classes to create a real product (in this case, an iOS news application) really gets me going. Additionally, I am excited to meet tons of new people in the workplace, who are all extremely intelligent and good at what they do. Lastly, I'm excited to take my leadership skills to a entirely new level, since my direction may ultimately decide the fate of the app, and potentially affect the image of the entire company.”

Despite Ryan’s obvious talent for computer science, he still considers it a hobby, and will start pursuing a career in medicine this fall. “I actually plan to become a physician in the future, and am attending the University of Illinois at Chicago in the fall, under their Guaranteed Professional Program Admissions (GPPA) program in Medicine, which guarantees me a spot in the University of Illinois College of Medicine.” Ryan explained. “However, my summer job will allow me to turn a mere hobby of mine (coding, creating software) into something that could potentially impact the lives of everyday people.”